Artist and architect Maya Lin has built essential landscapes and represented the Earth’s beauty and fragility with her geographic sculpture. Thrust into the public eye when she won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. while still a student, this Chinese-American artist has been able to withstand the maelstrom of celebrity and produce a body of work with outstanding artistic integrity, civic values and environmental awareness. Always at the boundary between disciplines, Maya Lin draws inspiration from nature and cartography as well as landscape architecture, land art and minimalism to make public art and sculptural objects that are at once monumental and intimate. While inevitably being associated with memorials, she has nonetheless been able to avoid being narrowly categorised into such solemn and lyrical territory, and to chart an artistic path of unique pedagogical value and exceptional aesthetic emotion, borrowing tools from science and processes from sculpture to increase public awareness about our responsibility towards the environment, the foundation of life itself, but also the source of transcendental spiritual experiences...
